ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way in which risk, as a central pillar of western modernity, stands up in the world. It shows that there are several disciplinary and normalising mechanisms that seek to lock in the global political economy to a model that is preferred by its dominant agents, who are primarily located within large organisations, of both a private and public kind. The chapter argues that risk is socioculturally specific, that all societies order their world, that risk is a mode of ordering, and that the western rationalist mode is not the only mode, Intelligible ordering systems exist elsewhere. It discusses the work of Ulrich Beck and examines the notion of a risk fact as a particular type of modern fact. This apparently simple proposition masks an extremely complex set of philosophical, historical and contemporary questions related to modern ways of comprehending the world.
